The concurrency primitives provided by Erlang are a perfect match to build stateful web applications.

Nowadays it is common to see stateless applications that depend on databases to keep any kind of state, but that adds some overhead.

Arguably, not using databases will create more problems than solve them. I will try to describe the trade-offs in building a databaseless web application and what are the different scenarios befitting such an approach. A web application that is independent of databases also has its own set of problems, specially when thinking about running that application in a distributed manner.

We've built such an application at uSwitch and I will walk you through the steps and different challenges we've faced while building it.

We hope that after hearing this talk you will be able to identify scenarios where databases won't be needed and thus write a stateless application.